The little room where he was born, the room upstairs with the high ceiling and the latticed windows, has not been changed, they say. They say too—and for this one was prepared—that he smoked his first pipe in England in the room over the porch. Sir Walter’s first pipe had evidently some of the qualities of the widow’s cruse. Wherever his name is heard the tradition of the first pipe lingers. He smoked it, we are told, on a rock in the Dart, and beside a Devon fireplace, and in an Irish garden, and here at Hayes.
And now, returning first to East Budleigh, we go on our way to the Ever Faithful City by lovely woods of fir and beech, and wide heaths, and hills and dales of richest green, with here a glimpse of sea and there a wealth of heather. Through Woodbury we go; and Clyst St. George, where the Champernownes lived; and Bishop’s Clyst, which was once Clyst Sachvill. The last of the Champernownes of Clyst was the unconventional Elizabeth, who married her first husband three days after her father’s death, and her second husband two days after her first husband’s death. “A frolic lady,” says John Prince. As for the Clyst that once belonged to the Sachvills and afterwards to the bishops, it changed hands in this manner. Sir Ralph Sachvill, being about to go to France in the service of Edward I., was in sore need of a large sum of money, and mortgaged the manor of Clyst to Bishop Branscombe of Exeter. The bishop, prudent man, forthwith built largely on the land, and made so many improvements that poor Sachvill, coming home from the wars with empty pockets, could not redeem his estate. So Clyst Sachvill became Clyst Episcopi, and the Bishops of Exeter visited it when they needed change of air. The time came, however, when “as Brounscomb cuningly gott it, soe did Bishop Voisey wastefully loose it.”
It was by this road that we are travelling on, this very excellent road from Otterton, that the Duke of Monmouth once came riding into Exeter; and it was somewhere near Bishop’s Clyst, I think, that a curious spectacle met his eyes. Twenty thousand people came out to welcome him, “but that which was more remarkable,” says the historian—and who will deny it?—“was the appearance of a brave company of stout young men, all clothed in linen waistcoats and drawers, white and harmless, having not so much as a stick in their hands.” There were nine hundred or a thousand of these innocents drawn up on a little hill. The Duke reviewed them solemnly, riding round each company. Then the stout and harmless youths marched two by two, hand in hand, before him into the city.
The story of Exeter has no beginning. To Norman and Saxon, Roman and Celt, it was a fortified stronghold, the Gate of the West. For centuries it was the desire of kings, the first thought of the invader, the forlorn hope of the rebel. Yet, as we drive through the dull suburb of Heavitree—which owes its grim name to the gallows—and pass into the heart of the town we see no sign of the walls that endured so many sieges, the walls that were built by Athelstane, that were attacked by Alfred, that fell before the Conqueror, that withstood Warbeck, that defended the cause of Charles: no sign of the towered archway that was once the entrance to Exeter and had Henry VII.’s statue above it: nothing to show us where poor Perkin, the king of straw, battered in his futile way upon the gate, “with casting of stones, heaving of iron barres, and kindling of fire,” nor where William the Conqueror, in ways that were not futile, battered so successfully—“although the citizens smally regarded him”—that it was believed “some part of the walls miraculously of his owne accord fell downe.” Nor is there any sign of the western gate that once stood at the further end of the High Street, the gate through which another William, seeking the same crown, came in a later century. Through this street, which Leland calls the fairest in Exeter, the great procession of William of Orange swept in all its splendour of bright armour and banners. Here where we are driving they passed by: the English gentlemen on Flanders steeds; the two hundred blacks in embroidered fur-lined caps with white feathers; the two hundred men of Finland in bearskins and black armour, with broad flaming swords, very terrible to unaccustomed eyes; the motto of the cause—“God and the Protestant Religion”—fluttering on fifty banners borne by fifty gentlemen; the led-horses and the pages and the grooms; and the prince himself, all glittering in armour upon his milk-white palfry, surrounded by his running footmen and followed by a mighty host. The billeting of this host upon the citizens of Exeter, says an eye-witness in a Letter to a Person of Quality, “was done so much to the content and satisfaction of the inhabitants, and such just payments made for what the soldiers had, and such civil behaviour among them, without swearing and damning as is usual among some armies, that it is admiration to behold.”
GUILDHALL, EXETER.
Of this brave show that meant so much to England there is no relic left; but there is still a memorial to be soon of another kingly procession that once passed down this street. Perkin Warbeck, after “mightily and tempestuously,” but quite vainly, assaulting the walls of Exeter, was pursued by Henry VII. to Taunton, and “about midnight departed in wonderful celerity” to the sanctuary of Beaulieu. Then the King rode into Exeter in state, and in his gratitude unbuckled the sword that Perkin had not waited to see, and took the beaver from his head, and gave both sword and hat to the citizens in acknowledgment of their “lusty hearts and manly courage.” Here, in this old grey building that projects across the pavement on our left, we may see them still. In this fairest street of Exeter there is nothing now so fair as the Guildhall with the granite pillars and the massive door of oak and the fluted panelling of Tudor days. In the gallery above the great hall are the two swords that won the crown of England, so to speak: the simple sword of Edward IV. and the splendid gilded one of Henry VII.; and with them, cased in rich embroidery, the black beaver hat in which Henry gained his easy triumph over Perkin. And among the pictures on the dark walls of the hall itself are two that have a special meaning in this place: Sir Peter Lely’s portraits of the young Duchesse d’Orléans and of the Duke of Albemarle. For it was in Exeter, in a house that has now vanished, that Charles I.’s daughter Henrietta was born; and when the Articles of Surrender were drawn up at Poltimore after the long siege, there was special provision made for the safety of the little princess; so that it was in a “fit and convenient carriage” that she started on that famous journey to Dover which she ended, to her great annoyance, in the disguise of a French peasant-boy. It was in Exeter, too, that young George Monk began his fighting career by thrashing the under-sheriff of Devon. The exploit drove him into the army, and when his talent for fighting had made him Duke of Albemarle the civic authorities let bygones be bygones, and set up his portrait here. Perhaps they recognised that the under-sheriff had richly deserved his chastisement.[2]
Unfortunately the same Articles that provided a convenient carriage for Princess Henrietta also decreed the destruction of Rougemont Castle, and there is nothing but a tower and a gateway left of the stronghold that Athelstane founded and William the Conqueror rebuilt. Yet even in this fragment there is one window, they say, of Saxon date, one window that has looked out on all the wild scenes that have been acted round the Red Mount. Exactly how many sieges this scrap of masonry has endured I do not know, nor how many crowned heads it has helped to shelter. William the Conqueror and Stephen took possession of it in person; Edward IV. and Richard III. visited it; and it was probably here that Henry VII. stayed when he came to Exeter at the time of the Warbeck rebellion, to try “the chief stirrers and misdoers.” “The commons of this shire of Devon,” he wrote to the Mayor of Waterford, “come daily before us in great multitudes in their shirts, the foremost of them having halters about their necks, and full humbly with lamentable cries for our grace and remission submit themselves unto us.” In the same vivid letter he expresses a hope that Perkin’s wife will soon come to Exeter, “as she is in dole.” It is not from Henry himself that we learn, however, that when the poor lady actually arrived in this city he “wondered at her beauty and her attractive behaviour.”